Family And Gender Research Paper

1. The Classical Liberal Legacy—Patriarchal Antipatriarchalism

Classical liberal theory is one of the constitutive elements of modern society. Liberal political ideas emerged against the background of the collapse of the feudal social order and the emergence of a society based on market relations. Liberalism simultaneously promoted the ideals of freedom and equality, and strict separation between a public and a private realm. However, classical liberalism’s assertion that principles of equality and freedom should be limited to the public realm has led many later thinkers to see the transformation of power in private family households as the last remaining objective of an incomplete revolution.

The most celebrated exponent of classical liberalism, John Locke, developed his doctrine in opposition to the doctrine of patriarchalism—a Latin term meaning the rule of the father. The patriarchalist Sir Robert Filmer had justified the absolute rule of the monarch by analogy to the ‘divine and natural’ authority of fathers over their households. In Filmer’s social world, no distinction was drawn between the public and the private capacity of the king. King James I, for example, was expected to finance his own government from the revenue generated by his own estates, crown lands, and customs.

Locke opposed Filmer precisely because Filmer conflated the political and the familial. In Locke’s view each institution had a separate purpose. Family, as an institution dealing with the rearing of dependent children, was organized around the inequality of parent and child. In a market society, politics, by contrast, was concerned with the coordination of independent individuals; that is to say, it was organized around the principle of equality. Thus, Locke rejects patriarchal doctrine, acclaiming the principle of public equality between reasoning adults, while at the same time endorsing patriarchy as the appropriate logic of the private realm of the family.

Locke and his contemporaries excluded women from the public realm because they assumed that rationality was an exclusively male characteristic. Locke recognized women’s role in procreation and the preparation of children for political life but assigned these activities to the private sphere. Furthermore, Locke believed that a ‘wife’s subordination to her husband had a ‘‘Foundation in Nature’’ and that the husband’s will must prevail in the household as he is naturally ‘‘abler and the stronger’’ ’ (Pateman 1989, p. 121).

Classical liberalism’s legacy, among other things, is a continuing tension between the antipatriarchal demand for equality associated with rule by consent in public life and the creation of a separate private sphere still based on patriarchal prerogatives. This tension has given rise to a demand for equality between the genders, even in the private sphere of the family. Indeed, the family has often been seen as a key institution and, in some cases, the very locus of patriarchal rule (Hartmann 1981). However, the demand for gender equality has different variants depending on different analyses of the significance of the family for the subordination of women.

2. Liberal Feminism—Escaping The Doll’s House

Liberal feminists accept broadly the classical liberal idea that citizenship is based on participation in public institutions, especially the (labor) market. Furthermore, liberal feminists also to a great extent accept that what happens at home is a private matter to be negotiated between husband and wife. Consequently, theorists of this persuasion argue that the key to women’s subordination is the restriction of women to the private sphere.

Liberal feminism urges women to be like Nora, the heroine of Henrik Ibsen’s play The Doll’s House, and throw off domesticity and participate fully in the labor market, competing with men for the economic and social rewards available through paid work. It assumes that the traditional domestic division of labor, where the man is the provider and the woman the homemaker, follows from the fact that the homemaker is more dependent economically on the provider. It is the dependence of the housewife on her husband, and not her gender, that is responsible for the sexual division of labor. The implication of this doctrine is that once women achieve economic independence, gender equality in the home will follow automatically.

From the perspective of liberal feminism, women’s legal rights to property, including property in their own person, is the first step in the emancipation of women. Liberal feminism broadly accepts the proposition that contemporary advanced industrial societies are meritocratic, and that women as a group are not innately less talented or less diligent than men but are denied opportunities simply because of their sex. It shares with neoclassical economics the belief that discrimination distorts the market mechanism and produces undesirable outcomes, while disagreeing with the neoclassical economists’ presumption that discrimination is an infrequent occurrence. Liberal feminism views wage discrimination and sex segregation of occupations in the labor market as a mechanism designed to exclude women from the labor market. Liberal feminist doctrine lies behind much of the legislation on antidiscrimination and equal opportunity. Discrimination against women, claims liberal feminism, often arises from stereotyped expectations.

These gender stereotypes and prejudices are often learned in the family. Like structural functionalist theory in sociology, liberal feminism sees the family as an institution that specializes in socialization. Children learn gender roles in the family, using role models available to them that are ‘reinforced’ by the wider society. Characteristically, liberal feminism implies that the inequitable influence of gender roles can be reversed by simply giving girls better role models, establishing equal opportunity in education, and encouraging high achievement aspirations. The mother’s role in the traditional domestic division of labor models poor achievement aspiration to daughters but it is not itself a source of constraint. The fundamental gender neutrality of the domestic division of labor, which liberal feminism presumes, can be justified on two distinct bases, either on the claim that the current organization of the family is an economically rational specialization of roles, or on the basis of the exchange theory of power.

Households, according to economist Gary Becker (1981), allocate their resources of time and money rationally between the spheres of market work, nonmarket work, and leisure. Individuals specialize in those tasks for which they have a ‘comparative advantage’; a decision based on relative productivities. Becker claims that small biological differences, such as lactation, give women an advantage in child rearing. Men become more productive at market work because gender specialization leads them to invest in their capacity to earn (human capital), through education and on-the-job experience. This leads to a situation where men’s wages are generally higher than women’s, and any extra allocation of men’s time to housework would oblige them to forgo a greater amount of income. By contrast, the ‘shadow price’ or opportunity cost of women’s time spent in unpaid work at home is lower, because the cost of income forgone is smaller. This somewhat circular reasoning leads to the claim that men have a ‘comparative advantage’ in paid work, while women have a ‘comparative advantage’ in unpaid work. Because each member specializes in activities where their advantage (productivity) is greatest, and they pool and exchange the rewards of these separate activities, the household is said to benefit from ‘gains of trade.’ Assuming an equitable distribution of these gains, the household that specializes is collectively better off than the one that does not. The asymmetry in the allocation of domestic work in the family is seen as a freely chosen and rational response to the biological differences plus inequalities in the labor market. The contribution of discrimination to gender inequality in the labor market is de-emphasized, since neoclassical economic theory implies that discrimination should erode in competitive markets. The allocation of domestic tasks will become symmetrical if the barriers to women’s economic emergence are removed, and their labor market situation becomes similar to that of men.

Sociological exchange theory does not require the assumption that everyone in the household strives to increase the household’s joint welfare. On the contrary, it assumes that whoever brings the most valuable resources to a marriage can expect to be able to bargain for some kind of compensation in the form of release from menial activities. In the traditional family, the wife provides domestic labor in return for economic support. The fact that housework and child care are done by women follows, according to exchange theory, from her inability to contribute socially recognized resources, such as money, to the relationship. In other words, responsibility for housework and child care falls to her because she contributes significantly less money rather than because she is a woman. Improve the labor market position of women, argue liberal feminists, and the inequities in the domestic division of labor will disappear.

If liberal feminists allow for any ‘stickiness’ in patterns of family organization this is attributed to a process of lagged communication and the learning of new sex role expectations. Women must acquire the techniques of assertiveness that allow them to negotiate their relationships with their partners. Men must learn to accept new domestic responsibilities and become ‘new fathers.’

3. Other Forms Of Feminism

Other forms of feminism view the family as a key site in the determination of gender equality. Nonliberal feminists have drawn attention to how the privatization of family life contributes to the subordination of women in two key respects. First, women’s unpaid work around the home is private, unseen, and devalued. Moreover, the pattern of the distribution of resources is hidden from view. Second, by definition, privacy screens family relations from view, allowing domination, including physical forms of coercion, to displace rule by consent. In addition, modern family relations have been seen as the crucible in which gender identity is forged.

Since the 1940s it has been popular to view the family as a ‘haven in a heartless world’—a secluded refuge from the ruthlessly impersonal world of market relations. However, according to its critics, this liberal view of the family as refuge relies on two propositions: the separation of home and work, and the idea that only market work is work.

Nonliberal feminists challenged the presumption of economics (before the development of Becker’s new home economics)—that the family household is purely a site of consumption—pointing to the valuable stream of goods and services produced in the home. In place of the separation of home and work, feminists substituted the distinction between paid and unpaid work. In the traditional division of labor, the male provider returns from market work (‘a hard day at the office’) to seek comfort and rest at home. For his homemaker spouse, however, the home is the site of her work.

Just how nonmarket work (performed in private homes) became virtually invisible, even to social scientists, would make a fascinating study. It is possible, however, to make explicit some of the social conditions that make this illusion possible. In premodern times, households were largely self-sustaining (consuming mostly goods produced at home) and most work was nonmarket work. However, as soon as market exchange becomes the dominant principal of economic organization, most things start to be bought with money. A labor market develops where people buy and sell the capacity to work for a stipulated amount of money (a wage). Money becomes the universal measure of value. Since mothers and housewives receive no pay for their work, it is seen as valueless, as not actually work at all. By the middle of the twentieth century the idea of housework as an instrumental labor process had disappeared so thoroughly that most celebrated social theorists of the time thought that wives and mothers specialized in ‘expressive’ behavior (Parsons and Bales 1955).

In contrast to the gender-neutral theories of the allocation of unpaid work favored by liberal feminists, other varieties of feminism place great emphasis on the fact that unpaid work is allocated on the basis of gender, so that housework and child care continue to be ‘women’s work.’ Women, not men, interrupt their careers to raise a family. Indeed, men with families are more devoted to careers than single men. Studies of the time devoted to unpaid work show that women still do an overwhelming proportion of laundry, cleaning, cooking, and the physical care of children. The same studies show that men continued to specialize in mowing the lawn and polishing the car, and their chief contact with children is in the context of play.

Even when both partners are in full-time employment the sex segregation in unpaid work tasks does not diminish. The idea that gender relations within the family make it difficult to reassign the sex-stereotyped domestic responsibilities lies behind the anxiety about women performing a ‘second shift’ (Hochschild and Machung 1989).

Although responsibility for key domestic tasks is allocated to women, all members of the family enjoy the benefits of domestic work—live in clean dwellings, eat home-cooked meals, wear laundered clothes, receive emotional nurturance, etc. Although society as a whole depends on the reproduction of acculturated individuals, the costs of the activity of mothering, such as loss of lifetime earnings, reduced autonomy, and greater exposure to poverty, predominantly are borne privately by mothers.

The recognition of these facts about the distribution of domestic labor brings under suspicion the key presumption of the ‘rational’ specialization thesis, namely joint family welfare. These suspicions are reinforced by research into the relationship between women’s share of family income and consumption of market goods. If families work to maximize their common (unitary) utility and pooled resources, then their consumption will be determined by total family income alone, and not by who earns or controls income. However, there is mounting evidence that, independent of the amount of total family income, increasing women’s share of family income changes family expenditure patterns. The increasing women’s share of family income results in greater expenditure on goods and services preferred by women (women’s and children’s clothing, restaurant expenditures) (Lundberg et al. 1997). Taken together, this evidence suggests that neither the sexual division of labor nor the distribution of market and nonmarket goods and services is consensual.

This raises the prospect that the family as an institution is constituted by systematically unequal exchange between the genders. Indeed, significant numbers of feminists believe that men as a social group actively or passively resist the reallocation of responsibility for domestic tasks because, as beneficiaries of this unequal exchange, it is not in their interests to change (Delphy and Leonard 1992).

Recognition of resistance leads feminists to explore the basis of capacity to resist, or to say the same thing in different words, to seek out the sources of male power. While liberal feminists tend to see men’s dominance of the public sphere as the key to their power, radical feminists have often sought the basis of male power in family relations.

A simple, and long neglected, form of male power is physical coercion. The rise of second-wave feminism toward the end of the 1960s was accompanied by a growing recognition of the shocking extent of domestic violence. The significance of this kind of coercion is probably greater than the recorded incidence of violent acts, because in most social systems it is the threat of violence (terror) rather than direct acts of physical coercion that intimidates people into acquiescence. Susan Brownmiller used a similar logic when she claimed that rape is ‘a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear’ (1975, p. 15). Emphasizing the crime of rape focused attention on the fact, a legacy of classical liberal thinking, that in most jurisdictions rape within marriage was not a crime in the middle of the twentieth century.

Domestic violence, and rape within marriage in particular, is so unexpected (even shocking) because they contradict the notion that family relations are relations between consenting equals. Much of the debate around sexual harassment and date rape also centers on the issue of consent. In classical liberal terms, it has become natural for us to allow the standards of liberty and equality developed as principles applying only to the public sphere to spill over to the private sphere. Many writers argue that the contemporary family is based on the progressive democratization of intimate relations.

Most social scientists believe that few systems of power can rely on coercion alone, and that the routine exercise of power must be seen as somehow legitimate. Sociologists believe that power is most successful when it becomes domination, that is, when it operates with the apparent consent of the dominated. Among the ideas that can be used to legitimate domestic inequality, a few have received the most consistent theoretical attention. The first is to present it as consensual and beneficial. Opponents of the ‘rational’ specialization thesis argue that this doctrine serves as an apologia for patriarchalism at home. The second focus has been the devaluation of women’s work. Devaluation generally consists of diminishing the perceived importance of something, failing to recognize its true worth. The extreme case of devaluation is complete invisibility—which was a notable feature of the treatment of household productive activities as ‘expressive’ rather than ‘instrumental.’ The third idea that has received attention is the association of domestic work with femininity and its obverse, the association of masculinity with market work. Gender identity, many claim, is a major support for patriachalism in the family and a significant obstacle to the achievement of gender equity.

The idea that the activities typically associated with women have been devalued has led to both attempts to revalue women’s work, for example, through comparable worth campaigns, and attempts to reconsider the relationship between equality and difference. At one level this has involved positive emphasis on ‘women’s values’ (sensitivity, caring, and nurture) in opposition to the male values of competition, self- centeredness, aggression, and violence.

The celebration of difference has often been accompanied by an intellectual exploration of the socially constructed nature of gender identity which has taken priority over an analysis of family relations. Theories about language, and more broadly discourse, have been used to argue that signs used to represent things are arbitrarily self-referential. Self-referential because the meaning or one word is defined in terms of its relationship to other words—for example, ‘light’ is the opposite of ‘dark,’ while ‘many’ is defined against the background of the concept of ‘one.’

It follows from this approach that the most powerful thing a social analyst can do is to deconstruct the discursive practices through which the social world is portrayed. The political objects of these more recent postmodern varieties of feminism have been representations of women and men, their bodies and relations in the various media of cultural transmission. Feminist theory has moved away from a preoccupation with things to emphasis on the salience of words and other cultural symbols.

Of course, the method of deconstruction can and has also been applied to the texts of feminist theory itself. This has made it problematic to assume that a political movement, with common objectives, can be rooted in a single category called ‘women.’ There has been an emerging sensitivity to the idea of difference among women, especially between ‘women of color’ and ‘white middle-class feminists.’ Hooks (1984) has argued that, for black American women, the family has been a source of solidarity and resistance to white racism and therefore less oppressive to black women than white American women. This emphasis on difference has been combined with a hostility derived from postmodernism to grand narratives or ‘totalizing’ conceptions. Generally, this has resulted in a political agenda that celebrates multiple identities, plastic sexuality, and diversity of household types ranging beyond the currently known groupings of family household.

From this perspective, sexual identity is an arbitrary cultural or social product. Gender identity, however, is seen as among the elements that contribute, in the deepest sense, to the conception of what one is. In 1978 Nancy Chodorow drew on a variant of Freudian psychodynamic theory (object relations theory) to explain gender differentiation and the different personality traits of adult men and women. Chodorow argued that because women are currently responsible for the primary care of children, this situation creates deeply internalized, unconscious desires in sons and daughters that reproduce male dominance and female mothering. When women ‘mother,’ all children have an initial attachment to and identification with a female. Because boys have a carer of a different sex, achieving gender identity encourages emotional separation from the mother. Individuating from a female carer encourages boys to define their masculine gender identity that emphasizes difference from and rejection of femaleness, identification with emotionally absent (non-nurturing) males. For girls, raised by a same-sex carer, gender identity and individuation are not as mutually reinforcing. Thus, males grow up with an internalized need to emphasize separation and with misogynistic tendencies to define themselves in opposition to whatever is female; females grow up with a desire for emotional connection, including mothering. Chodorow draws the heartening conclusion that if men were to ‘mother,’ and therefore become more like women, this would change the masculine psyche. Chodorow’s proposal to create greater gender equity ultimately turns on reforming the nurturing relations in the family.

Interest in the formation of gender identity, especially masculinity, has increased since Chodorow wrote The Reproduction of Mothering, using a different framework for understanding the process which places more emphasis on the role of culture and less on family relations. The most prominent alternative approach is social constructionism. In social constructionist variants, ‘gender is not fixed in advance of social interaction, but is constructed in interaction’ (Connell 1995, p. 35). It encourages study of the construction of masculinity in everyday life, acknowledges the existence of significantly different masculinities, and emphasizes the contradictory and dynamic nature of gender. This framework presupposes that Western culture typically valorizes the masculine over the feminine. The sexual division of labor at home has been viewed as a scaffold for the construction of gender identities.

4. Conclusion

The relationship between families and gender continues to be the subject of dispute in the social sciences. The ‘linguistic turn’ in the study of gender relations has directed attention to the most general cultural determinants of the gender identity of family members. The economic significance of nonmarket work has directed fresh attention to the process of home production. The classical liberal values of freedom and equality have proven themselves to be irrepressible, and although the split between the public sphere and the private sphere has endured, it has proven difficult to limit the demands for equality purely to the public sphere.

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